Google Pixel Fold is now available for pre-order and will begin shipping next month. Our new foldable phone combines the helpfulness of Pixel with a design that unfolds into a compact tablet, unlocking even more ways for you to use your device. And it's all powered by our Google Tensor G2 chip, which also makes Pixel Fold fast and secure. Here's a look at the newest addition to our Pixel portfolio.

When closed, Pixel Fold has a familiar smartphone silhouette that fits in the palm of your hand and slides into your pocket. Flip it open to reveal a 7.6-inch screen with a thinner profile than any other foldable phone in the market. To create this foldable design, we didn't compromise on form and function. Many of the Pixel components—from camera, battery, speakers and haptics technology—were cleverly redesigned to fit within the thin design. Our custom-built hinge not only contributes to that thinness, but also doubles as the most durable hinge out there. And last but not least, Pixel Fold has an IPX8 rating for water resistance.

Say hello to the Google Pixel Tablet, designed to be helpful 24/7 in your hand and in your home. It's built with the latest Android features, our Google Tensor G2 chip and our iconic Pixel design. Here's a look at what's in the new tablet and all the reasons why you won't leave this device forgotten in a drawer. With a brilliant 11-inch display and four built-in speakers for crisp audio, the tablet is the perfect entertainment companion. The Pixel Tablet looks and feels great—with its fresh colors (Porcelain, Hazel and Rose) and rounded edges. Plus, the aluminium enclosure is textured with our unique nano-ceramic coating, making it easy to grip.

We worked closely with the Android team so the apps you love—like YouTube, Spotify, Disney+ and more—look better and are easier to browse on the big(ger) screen. Not sure what to watch? Pixel Tablet comes with the Google TV app optimized for the larger screen, so you can always find something. Plus, the tablet's fast performance and battery life—all powered by our Tensor G2 chip that's in our Pixel phones—make it the ideal tablet for playing your favorite games like Asphalt 9.

Implementing state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models requires large amounts of computation, both to train the underlying models, and to serve those models once they're trained. Given the demands of these workloads, a one-size-fits-all approach is not enough - you need infrastructure that's purpose-built for AI.

Together with our partners, we offer a wide range of compute options for ML use cases such as large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and diffusion models. Recently, we announced G2 VMs, becoming the first cloud to offer the new NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs for serving generative AI workloads. Today, we're expanding that portfolio with the private preview launch of the next-generation A3 GPU supercomputer. Google Cloud now offers a complete range of GPU options for training and inference of ML models.

Since its launch in 2015, Google Photos has used AI to help you get the most out of your memories - from automatically organizing and resurfacing your photos to helping you edit them with advanced tools like Magic Eraser and Photo Unblur. Today at I/O, we gave a sneak peek of Magic Editor, a new experimental editing experience that uses generative AI to help you reimagine your photos and make editing even easier.

Reimagine your photos with AI
With Magic Editor, you'll be able to make complex edits without pro-level editing skills. Using a combination of AI techniques, including generative AI, it will help you make edits to specific parts of an image - like the subject, sky or background - so you have even more control over the final look and feel of your photo. Sometimes the difference between a so-so picture and the perfect shot comes down to getting the framing just right. Magic Editor will help you improve the overall composition of your photo by allowing you to reposition the subject of your shot to the best spot.

The versatile ASUS Chromebook CX34 Flip lets you enjoy both work and play! The 16:10 14-inch aspect ratio display will make your viewing experience more immersive. The device also features an Intel Core processor, WiFi 6E and a long-lasting battery.

ASUS Chromebook CX34 Flip offers an exquisite blend of powerful performance and versatility to empower the way you work and play. This stylish laptop features a robust Intel Core processor, WiFi 6E and a long-lasting battery to ensure you're well-equipped to breeze through everyday tasks, wherever you are. Thanks to a 360° ErgoLift hinge, you can use ASUS Chromebook CX34 Flip in any mode, and an optional garaged stylus allows for intuitive input when it's time to jot down notes. To top it all off, military-grade durability gives you peace of mind when using ASUS Chromebook CX34 Flip on the go.

Apple announced a joint partnership with Google in submitting a new industry specification to curtail unwanted tracking via Bluetooth location-tracking devices currently on the market. The new standard would provide tracker detection across both iOS and Android, regardless of the brand of the tracker being used. The proposal addresses the concerns surrounding the ease in which a person can be tracked by a sneaky location-tracker stuck to their person, possession, or vehicle by bad-faith actors using the technology to stalk individuals. Apple has previous released updates to their Find My service which will alert the victim if they are being tracked by an unknown AirTag, but this tech relies on the person having an iPhone. Third party detection apps exist on Android, but they're far from perfect and aren't currently officially supported by any of the parent companies making Bluetooth location trackers.

The proposal has received industry wide support from other manufacturers such as Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee. Advocacy groups such as The National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Center for Democracy & Technology have also contributed to the specification draft. The draft has been submitted via the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a three month review and comment period open to interested parties that would like to weigh in on the proposed specification. After this period Apple and Google will work to address concerns and feedback before putting the specification into production by the end of 2023, unifying a tracking alerts system on all future versions of iOS and Android.

Geoffrey Hinton, British-Canadian psychologist, computer scientist, and 2018 Turing Award winner in deep learning, has departed the Google Brain team after a decade-long tenure. His research on AI and neural networks dating back to the 1980s has helped shape the current landscape of deep learning, neural processing, and artificial intelligence algorithms with direct and indirect contributions over the years. 2012's AlexNet, designed and developed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, formed the modern backbone of computer vision and AI image recognition used today in Generative AI. Hinton joined Google when the company won the bid for the tiny startup he and his two students formed in the months following the reveal of AlexNet. Ilya Sutskever left their cohort at Google in 2015 to become co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI; creators of ChatGPT and one of Google's most prominent competitors.

In an interview with the New York Times Hinton says that he quit his position at Google so that he may speak freely about the risks of AI, and that a part of him regrets his life's work in the field. He said that during his time there Google has acted as a "proper steward" of AI development, and was careful about releasing anything that might be harmful. His viewpoint on the industry shifted within the last year as Microsoft's Bing Chat took shots at Google's core business, the web browser, leading to Google being more reactionary than deliberate in response with Bard. The concern arises that as these companies battle it out for AI supremacy they won't take proper precautions against bad-faith actors using the technologies to flood the internet with false photos, text, and even videos. That the average person would no longer be able to tell what was real, and what was manufactured by AI prompt.

Last week the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) Education Fund issued a report titled "Chromebook Churn", and the technology press was quick in its reading and analysis of this PDF document - filled with unfavorable findings. The main focus of the consumer watchdog's investigation was on a great uptake of Chromebooks in the education sector - schools in the United States of America have been providing a high percentage of their students with the relatively cheap ChromeOS-based laptop computers - especially during the pandemic period. The PIRG's Churn report cites numerous sources regarding disappointing Chromebook lifespans - schools are experiencing a high rate of hardware failure and technical issues relating to software updates - and as a result of these problems, irreparable devices are piling up as e-waste.

PIRG has called on Google and its manufacturing partners to effectively "double the life of these widely used laptops, saving schools money and helping the environment." Chromebooks are considered to be a cost effective entry into computing, but the watchdog reckons that a nice starter price tag does not reflect well when stacked up against the product's long term prospects. Schools are experiencing a high rate of Chromebook failures, especially once devices hit a three year long usage mark, and the required repair process is said to be problematic. PIRG states that warranty terms are unfavorable beyond the manufacturer set lifespan, and schools are having to pay for third party renovations and sourcing of spare parts (which is a complicated process in itself). The watchdog posits that schools in the USA could save a total of $1.8 billion (for taxpayers) - if Google doubles the lifespan of Chromebook, not accounting for extra maintenance costs.

Alphabet Incorporated's Google AI division has today revealed a planned update for its Bard conversational artificial intelligence chatbot. The experimental generative artificial intelligence software application will become capable of assisting people in the writing of computer code - the American multinational technology company hopes that Bard will be of great to help in the area of software development. Paige Bailey, a group product manager at Google Research has introduced the upcoming changes: "Since we launched Bard, our experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI, coding has been one of the top requests we've received from our users. As a product lead in Google Research - and a passionate engineer who still programs every day - I'm excited that today we're updating Bard to include that capability."

The Bard chatbot was made available, on a trial basis, to users in the USA and UK last month. Google's AI team is reported to be under great pressure to advance the Bard chatbot into a suitably powerful state in order to compete with its closest rival - Microsoft Corporation. The Seattle-based giant has invested heavily into Open AI's industry leading ChatGPT application. Google's latest volley against its rivals shows that Bard's has become very sophisticated - so much so that the app is able to chew through a variety of programming languages. Bailey outlines these features in the company's latest blog: "Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation. We're launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript. And you can easily export Python code to Google Colab - no copy and paste required." Critics of AI-driven large language models have posited that the technology could potentially eliminate humans from the job market - it will be interesting to observe the coder community's reaction to Google marketing of Bard as a helpful tool in software development.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2023 -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language and its community of TLA+ practitioners. Inaugural members include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and Microsoft. TLA+ is a high-level language for modeling programs and systems, especially concurrent and distributed ones. TLA+ has been successfully used by companies to verify complex software systems, reducing errors and improving reliability. The language helps detect design flaws early in the development process, saving time and resources.

TLA+ and its tools are useful for eliminating fundamental design errors, which are hard to find and expensive to correct in code. The language is based on the idea that the best way to describe things precisely is with simple mathematics. The language was invented decades ago by the pioneering computer scientist Leslie Lamport, now a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research. After years of Lamport's stewardship and Microsoft's support, TLA+ has found a new home at the Linux Foundation.

Google has announced that the company is officially merging its subsidiaries focused on artificial intelligence to form a single group. More specifically, Google Brain and DeepMind companies are now joining forces to become a single unit called Google DeepMind. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai notes: "This group, called Google DeepMind, will bring together two leading research groups in the AI field: the Brain team from Google Research, and DeepMind. Their collective accomplishments in AI over the last decade span AlphaGo, Transformers, word2vec, WaveNet, AlphaFold, sequence to sequence models, distillation, deep reinforcement learning, and distributed systems and software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training and deploying large scale ML models."

As a CEO of this group, Demis Hassabis, a previous CEO of DeepMind, will work together with Jeff Dean, now promoted to Google's Chief Scientist, where he will report to the Sundar. In the spirit of a new role, Jeff Dean will work as a Chief Scientist at Google Research and Google DeepMind, where he will set the goal for AI research at both units. This corporate restructuring will help the two previously separate teams work together on a single plan and help advance AI capabilities faster. We are eager to see the upcoming developments these teams accomplish.

According to The Information, Microsoft has been working on creating custom processors for processing AI with a project codenamed Athena. Based on TSMC's 5 nm process, these chips are designed to accelerate AI workloads and scale to hundreds or even thousands of chips. With the boom of Large Language Models (LLMs) that require billions of parameters, training them requires a rapid increase of computational power to a point where companies purchase hundreds of thousands of GPUs from the likes of NVIDIA. However, creating custom processors is a familiar feat for a company like Microsoft. Hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Meta are already invested in the creation of processors for AI training, and Microsoft is just joining as well.

While we don't have much information about these processors, we know that Microsoft started the project in 2019, and today these processors are in the hands of select employees of Microsoft and OpenAI that work with AI projects and need computational horsepower. Interestingly, some projections assume that if Microsoft could match NVIDIA's GPU performance, the cost would only be a third of NVIDIA's offerings. However, it is challenging to predict that until more information is provided. Microsoft plans to make these chips more widely available as early as next year; however, there is no specific information on when and how, but Azure cloud customers would be the most logical place to start.

Google's business of providing the world's largest search engine is reportedly in jeopardy, as the latest reports indicate that Samsung could replace Google Search with another search engine as a default solution on its mobile devices. Samsung, which sells millions of devices per year, is looking to replace the current search engine, Google Search, in favor of more modern AI-powered models. Currently, Google and Samsung have a contract where Google pays the South Korean giant a sum of three billion US dollars per year to keep its search engine as a default option on Samsung's devices. However, this decision is flexible, as the contract is up for renewal and new terms are being negotiated.

With the release of the ChatGPT and AI-powered search that Microsoft Bing enables, Google is reportedly working hard to keep up and integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into Search. Google's answer to Microsoft Bing is codenamed Project Magi, an initiative to bring AI-powered search supposedly next month. To emphasize the importance of getting this to production, Google was ready to give up three billion US Dollars of revenue to Samsung for keeping Google Search as a default search engine for 12 years without a doubt. However, with the emergence of better solutions like Microsoft Bing, Samsung is considering replacing it with something else. The deal is still open, terms are still negotiated, and for now there are no official mentions of Bing. As a reminder, Google has a similar agreement with Apple, worth 20 billion US Dollars, and Google Search was valued at 162 billion US Dollars last year.

Tenstorrent hosted their "Nerds Talking to Nerds About RISC-V" event this week in India where a dozen high profile industry experts hosted technical talks and panels about every facet of the RISC-V landscape and future. Among these are some familiar names to anyone who's been keeping up on the CPU industry; Raja Koduri of his own AI Generative Gaming startup company, Lars Bergstrom of Google, Naveed Sherwani of Rapid Silicon, and of course Jim Keller the CEO of Tenstorrent itself. On the first day of the event a mere 42 minutes into the YouTube live stream during his keynote talk, Jim Keller is providing an overview of Tenstorrent's latest silicon design goals. He presents a slide showing a wide comparison of various competitor's integer performance in SPEC CPU 2017 INT wherein a raw performance value for AMD's yet released "Zen 5" is listed, as well as the operating frequency and TDP of the supposed sample.

The slide shows all of AMD's recent architectures starting with the original "Zen" (Naples) and the improvements each successive generation has made. Also shown is one of Intel's latest "Sapphire Rapids" Xeons, a projected performance point of NVIDIA's in-house CPU architecture "Grace", Amazon's "Graviton" series with a projected result for "Graviton 3," and Tenstorrent's own 8-wide RISC-V architecture as it currently performs in their labs. While all of these are fascinating results in their own right, we're going to narrow in on the "Zen 4" (Genoa) and "Zen 5" results. We can see from the Frequency and TDP charts that "Zen 4" is clocked at 3.8 GHz as it's equal to the Xeon Platinum 8480+ (which itself boosts to 3.8 GHz in light threaded workloads such as this) so is therefore likely a variant of EPYC 9354 or 9454 with its TDP configured at the minimum 240 W. The unnamed "Zen 5" CPU is shown to be running at around 4.0 GHz with the same 240 W TDP, a tiny 5% bump in core clock, while delivering a substantial 30% jump in performance. The most interesting detail here is that nowhere is it listed—as with "Grace" and "Graviton 3"—that this is a projected result.

It was widely reported yesterday that Phil Harrison has left Google, where he served a stint as Vice President and General Manager of the now shuttered Stadia cloud-based game streaming service. An official statement has not been released by Google or Harrison regarding a change in leadership - according to an article published by Business Insider, the latter's LinkedIn profile indicates an end date in April 2023. Harrison's departure from Google coincides roughly with the final shutdown of Stadia services back in January of this year.

Phil Harrison was announced as a new vice president and general manager at Google in early 2018, but the company had not revealed any plans to enter into the games console market at that point in time. The hiring of Harrison was viewed as an early preview of things to come, given his past experience of leadership roles at both Sony and Microsoft video games division. He spent 16 years of his career at Sony Corporation, ultimately becoming president of the company's Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios (SCE WWS) until departing in 2008. He joined Microsoft in 2012, following short spells at Infogrames, Atari and Gaikai. At Xbox he was the executive leader of the European Interactive Entertainment team until 2015. Google debuted its Stadia gaming platform in 2019, and to no surprise, Harrison was announced as the product manager for this new endeavor.

Valve has confirmed that its Steam platform will no longer support the Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems as of January 1st, 2024. Valve discontinued support for Windows XP and Windows Vista back in 2019.

Valve says that after that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows and users will need to update to a more recent release. The reason behind such a move, according to Valve, is that the newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome which no longer functions on older versions of Windows, and that the future of Steam will require Windows features and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.

Newegg Commerce, Inc., a leading global technology e-commerce retailer, announced today that the company is using ChatGPT to improve its customers' online shopping experience. Introduced in November 2022, ChatGPT from OpenAI is a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) program capable of providing information that improves efficiency in myriad situations.

"We're always evaluating our e-commerce technology to ensure we're providing the best customer experience. Through testing, we've proven that ChatGPT has a practical use for Newegg based on the added quality and efficiency it creates," said Lucy Huo, Vice President of Application Development for Newegg. "We deployed ChatGPT to improve content both on-site and off-site to help customers find what they want and elevate their experience. AI doesn't replace employees, but it adds resources so employees are available to handle more complex projects. We're still in the early phases of AI but the benefits for e-commerce may be substantial."

NVIDIA today announced Google Cloud is integrating the newly launched L4 GPU and Vertex AI to accelerate the work of companies building a rapidly expanding number of generative AI applications. Google Cloud, with its announcement of G2 virtual machines available in private preview today, is the first cloud services provider to offer NVIDIA's L4 Tensor Core GPU. Additionally, L4 GPUs will be available with optimized support on Vertex AI, which now supports building, tuning and deploying large generative AI models.

Developers can access the latest state-of-the-art technology available to help them get new applications up and running quickly and cost-efficiently. The NVIDIA L4 GPU is a universal GPU for every workload, with enhanced AI video capabilities that can deliver 120x more AI-powered video performance than CPUs, combined with 99% better energy efficiency.

We're starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. We're beginning with the U.S. and the U.K., and will expand to more countries and languages over time. Today we're starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. This follows our announcements from last week as we continue to bring helpful AI experiences to people, businesses and communities.

You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We've learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.

Google's internal team Project Zero, dedicated to the discovery and patching of zero-day vulnerabilities in mobile hardware, software, web browsers and open source libraries disclosed a series of vulnerabilities in Samsung's Exynos chipsets featured across a wide range of mobile devices. Four of these critical vulnerabilities allow for internet-to-baseband remote code execution, and testing conducted by Project Zero confirmed that an attacker can compromise a phone at the baseband level with only the victim's phone number. They believe that with sufficient skill an attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities completely silently and remotely. The fourteen other vulnerabilities are related but considered to not be as critical as they require a more extensive setup including a malicious mobile network operator or local access to the targeted device.

Due to the severity of the main four critical vulnerabilities Project Zero has delayed full disclosure on how the exploit works stating:

Due to a very rare combination of level of access these vulnerabilities provide and the speed with which we believe a reliable operational exploit could be crafted, we have decided to make a policy exception to delay disclosure for the four vulnerabilities that allow for Internet-to-baseband remote code execution.

About 3% of AMD Radeon graphics card users may experience lower than usual 3DMark TimeSpy performance, says UL Benchmarks, developers of the 3DMark graphics benchmark suite. The issue came to light when a Google developer noticed that his RX 7900 XTX exhibited lower than expected performacne in TimeSpy, and took it up with UL. While the 3DMark developer hasn't been able to reproduce the issue on their end, it mentions that AMD is aware of it, has had more luck in reproducing it, and is working on a driver-level fix. For now, UL offers no solution other than to roll back to older driver versions and try testing again.

Google is "positioning itself as a go-to tech partner for publishers of live-service video games" by offering its cloud gaming technology to outside companies. This is an interesting statement regarding the future trajectory of its cloud gaming infrastructure, given the scarcity of updates since the January 2023 shutdown of the Cloud giant's Stadia gaming platform.

Google Cloud's director of Game Industry solutions, Jack Buser, was interviewed by Axios in an article published earlier this week, he outlined the company's ambitions to move forward in a post-Stadia world. Google Cloud is seeking partnership with publishers, its technology is being offered to prospective clients as a support platform for live-service games. "Google is absolutely committed to games that are such a big part of our messaging," Buser said. "When we made the decision with Stadia, we were just like, look, we are committed to games as an industry."

Google has made changes to its Google One plans yet again, although this time around, its customers are actually getting more for their money. For those not familiar with the Google One service, it's Google's Dropbox, Microsoft's OneDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, Google has included things like support for its services though its One service and higher tiers have seen added benefits beyond more storage space, such as free access to Google's VPN service. Now the company has decided to give those on its 100 GB US$1.99 and 200 GB US$2.99 service tiers access to not only its VPN service, but has also added what the company calls a dark web report.

The dark web report allows you to search for potential stolen private information on the dark web, or rather, Google does the searching for you and tells you if there are any results in a report. The tricky part here is that you need to have the right info to search for in the first place, but it could be something simple like your email address or phone number, but it could also be your credit card details. The VPN service is for the time being limited to 22 countries that you can find in the screenshot below. It's unlikely that Google offers the best VPN service out there, but it could help protect against man in the middle attacks when using public WiFi if nothing else and it's a decent perk if you're already paying for the Google One service.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

ASUS today announced the newest additions to the ASUS Chromebook family—the 14-inch ASUS Chromebook CM14 and ASUS Chromebook CM14 Flip. With a fresh, stylish look and flexible designs these dynamic laptops are primed to boost productivity and empower fun, all day, every day.

Powered by an efficient MediaTek Kompanio 520 processor and with up to a 15-hour battery life, the new CM14 models deliver the freedom to stay productive throughout the day. These attractive, modern laptops also open a gateway to the best of Google, including the rich library of apps for work and leisure found on Google Play, and benefit from WiFi 6 for fast, stable connectivity at home, at the office, in the classroom or on the go.